Introduction
The investment in any new system takes a dedicated amount of time from the university to implement and ensure they have a fully working system. This document takes you through the likely time investment needed to implement Talis Aspire.
Time and tasks needed
The effort required by a university varies, however the key tasks are all the same. These include:
Talis Aspire Tenancy Setup Questionnaire (TSQ): This is a document that needs to be completed pre the Talis Implementation webinar. We recommend that to get this completed in a timely manner, you schedule the project team to meet for 2 hours to work through this in the first instance, and then to come together a few days later to complete any questions where more information was required. This is only a suggested approach, but one that limits the time it takes to complete.
Talis Implementation webinar: Talis run a 2 hour webinar - we require the complete project team from the university to attend this webinar.
Technical Discussion: 1 hours time is all that is required from your IT team. Post the initial webinar, we organise a call to discuss the more technical elements of your Talis implementation - this is typically an hour. Based on this, we understand which routes you chose, and this will then help us and you determine the time required to complete any technical setup.
An example of this is where standard authentication is setup based on responses in the tenancy setup questionnaire, but if you want to set up Devolved Constraints (enabling a more tailored approach to what you enable groups of people to do i.e. identifying an academic, and enabling all academics to create reading lists), then you would need to assess whether the knowledge existed in your IT team to do that. It may be this is proven and well understood within your technical team, if so, it may only take a couple of hours in testing to enable, but if this is the first project which your IT team have done which requires these changes, then a broader project which includes learning time might require more effort from your IT team.
In all cases we will work with you to make sure that you have all the information you need to be able to determine whether to go ahead with a particular course of action.
Talis have worked with many systems throughout implementation and we would ensure before the project starts that Talis Aspire can integrate with all of your systems and we would not expect any additional effort from Talis on this.
Design Discussion: Based on the requirements for your Talis Aspire design, we will ask for your design input and university assets (logo's, colours etc). Based on the information being easily available and a clear design requirement is established, from the university perspective we are talking about the time the review process takes - for some, this is one person reviewing, for others it has to go to a committee, that requires a more formal approach.
Testing and Review: As Talis create your tenancy we will ask that you test your implementation to 'sign off' on each stage.
For example: Can you login? - If the answer is yes, you'd signoff in basecamp that this is complete (a simple tick in a box).
We suggest that the project team allocate time to 'play' with the system as we make it available to get a feel for how everything works, and to start to help them shape how they want to roll this out within your university. This is difficult to allocate a defined amount of time to as it is based on how each university works and how the project team work together.
Training: Talis create a tailored 2 days training course for each university, covering topics identified during implementation, as well as standard areas that we know are important to cover and discuss.
Rollout: During implementation, we work with you to shape your Talis rollout approach. The focus of effort during implementation is planning, and ensuring that the groundwork is being done in creating the core messaging, so that post implementation you don't lose time as you prepare for rollout. Again based on the strategic approach taken, the required effort from the university perspective varies.
Each of these elements vary in terms of effort required from the university. We would recommend that as part of your consideration of Talis as a potential supplier, we organise a call for you with a university who has recently been through the implementation process. This will help to effectively shape your understanding of the effort that you would expect within the collaboration.